Whatever the truth about the efficacy or otherwise of nicotine patches, clearly it is high time I gave my own infallible cure for smoking its five-yearly outing.
This is what you do.
You don't give up smoking.
But to begin at the beginning. First it is necessary to catch flu.
Or, if not flu, then a very heavy cold. Or, if not a heavy cold, then some other respiratory affliction that renders you not so much unwilling, as unable, to smoke without coughing your lungs out.
You buy a packet of 20 but resolve to let the cough subside before you resume the habit of a lifetime. The cough subsides all right but you are left with a chesty wheeze.
You decide that no harm will come of waiting for the wheeze to fade out before lighting up again.
The wheeze fades out. It is by now the middle of the month.
You think to yourself that if you wait until the first of next month your lungs will have been given every change to repair themselves.
The first of the month comes and goes. By now you have a new target date - why not Shakespeare's birthday, April 23? Or Oliver Cromwell's birthday, April 25? It doesn't matter which - you are never going to keep your date with destiny.
You see what we're doing, don't you? We are moving the goalposts. You should have started smoking again a good month ago by now but that packet of 20 remains untouched. Why?
Because you haven't got the willpower to start up smoking again, have you?
For years now you have meant to give up smoking one of these days but you've always been too weak-willed to do so. Now the boot is on the other foot. You are too weak-willed to light that first cigarette.
You have transferred your pathetic lack of willpower and self-control into a positive force rather than a negative one.
It works, believe me. It is now well over 30 years since the weed last touched my lips. Yet never for an instant have I ever accepted that I have given up smoking.
It is the other way round - smoking has given up on me, but all it needs is a OWNS and cities up and down Britain are now jostling one another in their eagerness to be the first to impose an all-out ban on smoking in public places.
Meanwhile, there is bad news for those who have been intending to give up voluntarily without waiting to have their collars felt by a posse of health 'n' safety police lurking behind the Jubilee horse trough. It is that nicotine patches don't work.
Or so say anti-smoking experts - and who isn't an expert in this field? They claim that the patches are merely replacing one form of nicotine with another.
Red letter days have come and gone by the score while I struggled to succumb to temptation. My birthday, my children's birthdays, the Queen's birthday, the cat's birthday.
November 9, Dylan Thomas dies in New York. November 10, Stanley discovers Livingstone.
November 17, Suez Canal opened. December 16, Noel Coward born. . .
I've seen 'em come, I've seen 'em go, as my great predecessor, Cassandra, said in another context. But somehow I've never got round to smoking again.
I'll make it one of these days.
How about April Fool's Day?
For those of you wanting to try this at home, the important thing is not to give up smoking - ever. A temporary cessation between puffs is all you are seeking. How about October 29, the date of Sir Walter Raleigh's execution?
Not, however, for the sin of introducing tobacco to these shores
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